Biography

Carol Law’s work is sensitive to place and personal experience, often drawn on source imagery from her photographs as well as her collection of historical media images. Employing unpredictable juxtapositions, she incorporates gestures arising from painting, drawing and relief rubbings as unifying elements.

Chronologically her output has evolved from the early use of collaged, appropriated imagery in printed matter to other media and strategies, as she critically surveys the history of visual communication and cultural symbols. 

Born in Texas, Law earned her bachelor’s degree in art at the University of Texas, Austin, where she studied painting, drawing and color theory with Robert Levers, a protégé of Joseph Albers. 

Thereafter she worked and traveled throughout Western & Eastern Europe for two years, visiting museums and art venues where she first encountered the art and philosoply of Dada and Surrealism that has continued to inform her work.  Returning to the U.S. she completed an M.A. in Studio Art at San Francisco State University studying with Dennis Beall, John Ihle, and Robert Bechtle.

Law’s work, which has been exhibited internationally, often blurs the boundaries between traditional media, and for fifteen years she taught experimental printing techniques at various universities, including San Francisco State, the San Francisco Art Institute, UC Santa Barbara and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has been the recipient of three collaborative NEA grants for stage performance works and a number of visual art commissions.

From 1993-1997 she was the General Manager of the Djerassi Resident Artist Program in Woodside, CA.  In 1999 she was awarded a special one-year fellowship to be in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation in Bellagio, Italy. 

She now resides in El Cerrito, California, with her composer husband Charles Amirkhanian. They have created many collaborative art performance works together utilizing her photography & video and his text-sound compositions. Throughout her life she has maintained an interest in psychology and the creation of personal iconography, receiving a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology from John F. Kennedy University in 1987.